William Spengler killed his grandmother with a hammer

This past year may have set a record for shootings involving multiple victims. The worst of these was the massacre in Newtown, CT, where Adam Lanza murdered 20 little children and seven adults, including his mother, before finally killing himself.

A short time later, William Spengler burned down his house in Webster, NY, in order to lure firefighters to their death. Before he killed himself, he murdered two firemen, wounded two others and a policeman, and left seven families homeless on Christmas Eve when his house fire spread to theirs.

In the aftermath of all this senseless violence, politicians decided what was needed were more gun control laws and the gumption to stand up to the NRA. That’s because politicians share a number of characteristics with sheep; what they lack is the ability to provide the world with mutton, wool and lamb chops.

So far as I know, none of the 2012 mass killings were perpetrated by members of the NRA. They were committed by men who should, themselves, have been committed. In the case of William Spengler, the question shouldn’t be where he got his guns, but inasmuch as he had bludgeoned his grandmother to death with a hammer back in 1980, why was he still alive and running around loose 32 years later?

The fact is assault weapons were banned in the 1990s and it did nothing to diminish violence in America. Gun control laws don’t make any of us any safer because criminals will always have access to their weapons of choice; such laws only deprive those who are law-abiding from protecting themselves, while giving self-righteous politicians the illusion that they are being proactive.

Although NRA’s chief honcho Wayne LaPierre came in for a lot of predictable razzing when he suggested that cops be stationed at America’s schools, I had already come up with the notion on my own. I mean, why should Obama’s daughters be so much better-protected than everyone else’s kids?

When people snickered at LaPierre, pointing out that it would cost billions of dollars to pay the cops to patrol our thousands of schools, my own response was, “Who said anything about paying them?”

With all the ex-soldiers, ex-cops and retired NRA members in our midst, I suspect they would be quite willing to put in the time protecting their kids, grandkids, nephews and nieces. If we can have an all-volunteer military, why can’t we have an all-volunteer school patrol? And while we’re at it, I don’t see why we can’t have these men and women stationed in malls, playgrounds, parks and, if possible, at my front door.

In a related matter, when it comes to capital punishment, some people say that they base their objection on the Commandment against killing, but Biblical scholars will tell you that’s a fallacy, based on a bad translation of “Thou Shall Not Murder.”

Others argue that because there is a chance that an innocent person might be executed, it is better that a hundred guilty people go free. I can’t go along with that. It presupposes that those hundred will not murder anyone else. But as we know, and as William Spengler recently proved, it is not at all unlikely that an evil man who has murdered once will murder again.

But it is not just crime and punishment that engages me. For instance, I would advise Hollywood producers that if they wish to surprise an audience by bringing back a character in a movie who has apparently been killed off early in the proceedings, they should cast an unknown in the role. I still recall thinking how silly they were when, in “Mission Impossible” (1996), they showed Jon Voight being shot and falling into the river shortly after the movie began. I would hope that even small children were not blindsided when he reappeared later in the proceedings because even they understood that nobody was about to pay Mr. Voight’s salary for a two-minute cameo.

Finally, when liberals accuse conservatives of being racists because we hate what Obama, Eric Holder and Valerie Jarrett are doing to this nation, I am reminded that radio pundit Dennis Prager once pointed out that it’s conservatives who would be overjoyed to have nine black justices on the Supreme Court if they were exactly like Clarence Thomas, and that it’s left-wingers who regularly employ the most scurrilous racial invective when referring to the distinguished likes of Justice Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Thomas Sowell, Ward Connerly, Allen West, Walter Williams and Tim Scott.

It also bears mentioning that in districts in which white liberal voters constitute the majority, they never elect a black candidate to Congress. And what’s more, if the majority of those working in the media weren’t the sort of people who give cheap whores a bad name, they would occasionally point out the embarrassingly huge abyss that exists between what left-wingers say and the vile things they do.

For instance, after giving one of his typical somber, snooze-inducing, speeches in the wake of the Newtown tragedy, who did Barack Obama put in charge of the high-profile commission whose mission was to conduct a painstaking probe into gun violence? Why, none other than Joe Biden. But did you hear anyone in the media gasp in disbelief, “Joe Biden?!”

After all, nobody in his right mind would put Joe Biden in charge of bringing potato salad to a picnic. But, as we all know, the lap dog media would never question anything their personal savior says or does.

For my part, I was frankly astonished. Not in my wildest dreams would I have ever guessed that Obama had such a finely tuned sense of irony as to entrust a loose cannon with overseeing gun control legislation.